Art coup in Philly

By the time Charles Wilson Peale was the driving force behind the 1805 opening of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the country’s first art museum, folks already looked at the painter as art’s eccentric. He had searched for mastodons, collected odd animal bones, named his children after artists (Rembrandt, Titian and Raphaelle, among them) and had a personal menagerie of wild animals.

Peale also had fostered, in his collections and those of others, the establishment of an American art aesthetic in Philadelphia, making it a center for artists and collectors in the new nation.

Two centuries later, the legacy of another Philadelphia art eccentric, Albert C. Barnes, has the Philadelphia art scene abuzz. After a series of lawsuits over the last several years, Barnes’ unprecedented collection of Impressionists -- 181 Renoirs alone -- and other art is headed downtown from its secluded suburban lair. A new museum housing the Barnes Foundation is planned just blocks from the massive Philadelphia Museum of Art, creating a bridge to other museums and arts institutions along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. Among them: the Rodin Museum; the Franklin Institute, the city’s science museum; the Academy of Natural Sciences; a redesigned Free Library; several art universities and their galleries, including Moore College of Art and Design; and many outdoor sculptures. In addition, plans are progressing for a new museum dedicated to another Philadelphia art eccentric, Alexander Calder, to be built along the parkway, perhaps as early as 2008.

“What I like to say is that when visitors are planning to come to the United States, they will decide to go to Philadelphia with a side trip to New York,” said Rebecca W. Rimel, president and chief executive of the Pew Charitable Trusts, part of a consortium helping to finance the Barnes move. “There will not be any place in the world where they can have such an intense experience with the visual arts in such a condensed area.”

Philadelphia was designed by William Penn to be a dense city with grid streets surrounded by countryside. In the early 20th century, planners designed the parkway as a grand gesture: a tree-lined mile-or-so road leading northwest on a diagonal from City Hall, the tallest stone building in the world at the time, to Fairmount Park, the nation’s largest urban park. At its far end would be the new Philadelphia Museum of Art building, a replica of the Parthenon atop one of the highest points in an otherwise pancake-flat city. In between, save for some commercial areas around City Hall, the parkway to this day remains mostly park and public buildings.

Barnes made his fortune by his 30s in the early years of the 20th century developing and marketing the antiseptic Argyrol. He collected art and studied the seminal philosophers of the era, such as George Santayana, William James and John Dewey, and set up the Barnes Foundation in 1922 with Dewey as director of education. He housed his treasures in a wooded area outside the city, the main building designed by Paul Philippe Cret, who also designed the museum on the parkway for the Mastbaum family to house its collection of Rodin sculptures. Barnes hung his paintings and other art in his own philosophical way, mostly without signs or wall text, and the foundation held classes to explain his theories.

In recent years, as the Barnes collection became more well-known, visitor hours and policies grew more restrictive. Lower Merion Township, perhaps the most prestigious town on Philadelphia’s Main Line (and recently known as the childhood hometown of Lakers’ star Kobe Bryant) limited parking and traffic to help preserve neighborhood tranquillity. Supported by the $10 million Barnes left it upon his death in 1951, the foundation began to feel financially strapped, and its trustees advocated relocation. Eventually, the Pew and two other longtime art supporters in Philadelphia -- the Lenfest Foundation and the Annenberg Foundation -- said they would ante up $100 million toward a move to the city.

Lawsuits, based on Barnes’ will and alleging that he never wanted the art or foundation moved, came and finally went over the last three years. The plan now is to display the art in much the way that Barnes dictated but in a new building on the current site of the Philadelphia Youth Study Center, a juvenile correctional facility a block from the Rodin Museum.

“This is something that is a real rallying point for the arts and tourism communities to bring us more closely together,” said Meryl Levitz, who runs the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. “When the Barnes is on Latches Lane, you can’t talk about it as a tourist lure because the tickets, maybe only 100 a day sometimes, are taken months in advance. You can’t just lope over there and expect to get in. But now this is an international draw.”

Critics have said that the whole point of the Barnes collection is to have it where Barnes put it, in a building that has a particular kind of light, in a garden setting in the suburbs. Jay Raymond, a former Barnes student and teacher who brought an unsuccessful lawsuit to avoid relocation, said that the move intended to enhance art is actually destroying a work of art.

“The institution as it stands is, in fact, the work of art,” said Raymond, who added that the group calling itself the Friends of the Barnes will continue to investigate whether the move can be avoided or concessions obtained.

“This building will be cocooned inside of a much larger structure,” Raymond said. “You will be on a busy city street and in a modern-looking structure, and buried there will be the tomb that is the Barnes. You won’t get the feel of what it was like.”

Although Rimel acknowledges that this is true, she sees greater public access as a positive thing.

“We had two primary objectives: to make sure the foundation was on secure financial footing and to make sure the art and the education programs were accessible,” she said. “We could have just given money to solve the first problem, but that would have done nothing for the second.... This is a public asset, something to make Philadelphia even more paramount in art.”

Philadelphians are notoriously defensive about their city’s status versus that of New York, a 90-minute drive to the north, and Washington, less than three hours to the south. Be it sports, commerce, art or history, residents are never loath to tout what they have to offer that might be superior to that of neighboring cities.

“Now this gives the region a more well-rounded, less defensive stand,” said William W. Moore, president and chief executive of Independence Visitors Center. “To the outside world, now we can say we’re not just the history place but a place where you can do everything -- art, music, dining, everything.”

Anne d’Harnoncourt, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, said the new Barnes, the Calder or anything else along the parkway will amount to a block party for Philadelphia art.

“I don’t see this as competition at all,” D’Harnoncourt said. “Every time we have a big exhibition, like Cezanne or our recent Dali show, it brings in people from all over the world, and they don’t just do one museum and leave. In Paris, it’s wonderful to have the Orsay right across the river from the Louvre. Is that competition?

“Our purpose is for people to come to Philadelphia for great art, and the Barnes being more accessible to people serves that purpose well,” she said.

Diane Dalto, project director for the proposed Calder museum, said that although the museum remains in the planning stages, it will be built and that two museums planning to open in 2008 will be a boon to the city.

“I think this will make the parkway the most extraordinary museum mile in the world,” said Dalto, who also chairs the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts. “Philadelphia already has the highest per capita number of art students in the country, and this is bound to attract more here. You bring collections with special auras, which also attract young people, and you revive a city.”

Moving the Barnes to the parkway will give the half-mile or so between the Museum of Art and the Barnes’ new home a vital concentration of Impressionist and Postimpressionist art. At the Barnes, in addition to the Renoirs, there are 69 Cezannes, 59 Matisses, 46 Picassos -- more than 9,000 works in all.

To the outsider, some rooms at the Barnes can seem hung willy-nilly: One gallery wall has 14 Cezannes and Renoirs, while another has Picasso and Modigliani next to African masks. But Kimberly Camp, executive director of the foundation, says that replicating that layout in the new facility will distinguish it among its new neighbors.

“It was all done for educational reasons, so that is why we are not a museum but a school,” Camp said. “That is what will make us unique along the parkway. We will be there primarily for education.”

However Camp characterizes it, Paul Levy, president of Center City District, the downtown business improvement district, is glad the Barnes is moving. “Like a college campus, this will be a cultural campus, attractive to residents and tourists alike,” he said. “Cities need the critical mass of things to make a rather lifeless area into an animated one. Some do it with restaurants or ballparks. The move of the Barnes will do it with art.”